The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow

The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow
Author: DaMaris B. Hill
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2016-06-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0739197886

The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow: Staking Claims in the American Heartland engages in an important conversation about race relations in the twentieth century and significantly extends the historical narrative of the Civil Rights Movement. The essays in this collection examine instances of racial and gender oppression in the American heartland—which is conceived of here as having a specific cultural significance which resists diversity—in the twentieth century, instances which have often been ignored or overshadowed in typical historical narratives. The contributors explore the intersections of suffrage, race relations, and cultural histories, and add to an ongoing dialogue about representations of race and gender within the context of regional and national narratives

Fourierist Communities of Reform

Fourierist Communities of Reform
Author: Amy Hart
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2021-07-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 3030683567

This book explores the intersections between nineteenth-century social reform movements in the United States. Delving into the little-known history of women who joined income-sharing communities during the 1840s, this book uses four community case studies to examine social activism within communal environments. In a period when women faced legal and social restrictions ranging from coverture to slavery, the emergence of residential communities designed by French utopian writer, Charles Fourier, introduced spaces where female leadership and social organization became possible. Communitarian women helped shape the ideological underpinnings of some of the United States’ most enduring and successful reform efforts, including the women’s rights movement, the abolition movement, and the creation of the Republican Party. Dr. Hart argues that these movements were intertwined, with activists influencing multiple organizations within unexpected settings.

The Turtle's Beating Heart

The Turtle's Beating Heart
Author: Denise Low
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2017
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0803296533

"Grandchildren meet their grandparents at the end," Denise Low says, "as tragic figures. We remember their decline and deaths. . . . The story we see as grandchildren is like a garden covered by snow, just outlines visible." Low brings to light deeply held secrets of Native ancestry as she recovers the life story of her Kansas grandfather, Frank Bruner (1889-1963). She remembers her childhood in Kansas, where her grandparents remained at a distance, personally and physically, from their grandchildren, despite living only a few miles away. As an adult, she comes to understand her grandfather's Delaware (Lenape) legacy of persecution and heroic survival in the southern plains of the early 1900s, where the Ku Klux Klan attacked Native people along with other ethnic minorities. As a result of such experiences, the Bruner family fled to Kansas City and suppressed their non-European ancestry as completely as possible. As Low unravels this hidden family history of the Lenape diaspora, she discovers the lasting impact of trauma and substance abuse, the deep sense of loss and shame related to suppressed family emotions, and the power of collective memory. Low traveled extensively around Kansas, tracking family history until she understood her grandfather's political activism and his healing heritage of connections to the land. In this moving exploration of her grandfather's life, the former poet laureate of Kansas evokes the beauty of the Flint Hills grasslands, the hardships her grandfather endured, and the continued discovery of his teachings.

Black Girl Magic Beyond the Hashtag

Black Girl Magic Beyond the Hashtag
Author: Julia S. Jordan-Zachery
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2019-10-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0816540462

Hashtag or trademark, personal or collective expression, #BlackGirlMagic is an articulation of the resolve of Black women and girls to triumph in the face of structural oppressions. The online life of #BlackGirlMagic insists on the visibility of Black women and girls as aspirational figures. But while the notion of Black girl magic spreads in cyberspace, the question remains: how is Black girl magic experienced offline? The essays in this volume move us beyond social media. They offer critical analyses and representations of the multiplicities of Black femmes’, girls’, and women’s lived experiences. Together the chapters demonstrate how Black girl magic is embodied by four elements enacted both on- and offline: building community, challenging dehumanizing representations, increasing visibility, and offering restorative justice for violence. Black Girl Magic Beyond the Hashtag shows how Black girls and women foster community, counter invisibility, engage in restorative acts, and create spaces for freedom. Intersectional and interdisciplinary, the contributions in this volume bridge generations and collectively push the boundaries of Black feminist thought.

Breath Better Spent

Breath Better Spent
Author: DaMaris Hill
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2022-01-25
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1635576628

A Netgalley "Must-Read Books by Black Authors in 2022" From the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing comes a new book of narrative in verse that takes a personal and historical look at the experience of Black girlhood. In Breath Better Spent, DaMaris B. Hill hoists her childhood self onto her shoulders, together taking in the landscape of Black girlhood in America. At a time when Black girls across the country are increasingly vulnerable to unjust violence, unwarranted incarceration, and unnoticed disappearance, Hill chooses to celebrate and protect the girl she carries, using the narrative-in-verse style of her acclaimed book A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing to revisit her youth. There, jelly sandals, Double Dutch beats, and chipped nail polish bring the breath of laughter; in adolescence, pomegranate lips, turntables, and love letters to other girls' boyfriends bring the breath of longing. Yet these breaths cannot be taken alone, and as she carries her childhood self through the broader historical space of Black girls in America, Hill is forced to grapple with expression in a space of stereotype, desire in a space of hyper-sexuality, joy in a space of heartache. Paying homage to prominent Black female figures from Zora Neale Hurston to Whitney Houston and Toni Morrison, Breath Better Spent invites you to walk through this landscape, too, exploring the spaces-both visible and invisible-that Black girls occupy in the national imagination, taking in the communal breath of girlhood, and asking yourself: In a country like America, what does active love and protection of Black girls look like?

Erotic Testimonies

Erotic Testimonies
Author: Julia S. Jordan-Zachery
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2022-12-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1438491182

Erotic Testimonies draws inspiration from Audre Lorde's "Uses of the Erotic" to explore how Black women access their interiority and use their feelings to engage in processes of self-actualization and make themselves free. Blending genres and resisting the confines of conventional scholarly analysis, Julia S. Jordan-Zachery undertakes what she characterizes as a performative embodied reading of testimonies by four "wild" women from her own life. Jordan-Zachery takes care not to define what constitutes a wild woman—that's been done enough to oppressive ends—but rather tends to these women's forms and means of self-articulation. Complex accounts of wildness, freedom, femininity, the erotic, and the divine emerge from her field notes. Erotic Testimonies attests to the experience of the individual as well as, and even more importantly, how the individual speaks to a broader collective that here includes Lorde, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Janet Jackson, the author, her grandmother, and many more.

Four Hundred Souls

Four Hundred Souls
Author: Ibram X. Kendi
Publisher: One World
Total Pages: 529
Release: 2022-02-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0593449347

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A chorus of extraordinary voices tells the epic story of the four-hundred-year journey of African Americans from 1619 to the present—edited by Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, and Keisha N. Blain, author of Set the World on Fire. FINALIST FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post, Town & Country, Ms. magazine, BookPage, She Reads, BookRiot, Booklist • “A vital addition to [the] curriculum on race in America . . . a gateway to the solo works of all the voices in Kendi and Blain’s impressive choir.”—The Washington Post “From journalist Hannah P. Jones on Jamestown’s first slaves to historian Annette Gordon-Reed’s portrait of Sally Hemings to the seductive cadences of poets Jericho Brown and Patricia Smith, Four Hundred Souls weaves a tapestry of unspeakable suffering and unexpected transcendence.”—O: The Oprah Magazine The story begins in 1619—a year before the Mayflower—when the White Lion disgorges “some 20-and-odd Negroes” onto the shores of Virginia, inaugurating the African presence in what would become the United States. It takes us to the present, when African Americans, descendants of those on the White Lion and a thousand other routes to this country, continue a journey defined by inhuman oppression, visionary struggles, stunning achievements, and millions of ordinary lives passing through extraordinary history. Four Hundred Souls is a unique one-volume “community” history of African Americans. The editors, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, have assembled ninety brilliant writers, each of whom takes on a five-year period of that four-hundred-year span. The writers explore their periods through a variety of techniques: historical essays, short stories, personal vignettes, and fiery polemics. They approach history from various perspectives: through the eyes of towering historical icons or the untold stories of ordinary people; through places, laws, and objects. While themes of resistance and struggle, of hope and reinvention, course through the book, this collection of diverse pieces from ninety different minds, reflecting ninety different perspectives, fundamentally deconstructs the idea that Africans in America are a monolith—instead it unlocks the startling range of experiences and ideas that have always existed within the community of Blackness. This is a history that illuminates our past and gives us new ways of thinking about our future, written by the most vital and essential voices of our present.

A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing

A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing
Author: DaMaris Hill
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2019-01-15
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1635572622

Nominated for an NAACP Image Award A Publishers Weekly Top 10 History Title for the season Booklist's Top 10 Diverse Nonfiction titles for the year BookRiot's "50 Must-Read Poetry Collections" Most Anticipated Books of the Year--The Rumpus, Nylon A revelatory work in the tradition of Claudia Rankine's Citizen, DaMaris Hill's searing and powerful narrative-in-verse bears witness to American women of color burdened by incarceration. “It is costly to stay free and appear / sane.” From Harriet Tubman to Assata Shakur, Ida B. Wells to Sandra Bland and Black Lives Matter, black women freedom fighters have braved violence, scorn, despair, and isolation in order to lodge their protests. In A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, DaMaris Hill honors their experiences with at times harrowing, at times hopeful responses to her heroes, illustrated with black-and-white photographs throughout. For black American women, the experience of being bound has taken many forms: from the bondage of slavery to the Reconstruction-era criminalization of women; from the brutal constraints of Jim Crow to our own era's prison industrial complex, where between 1980 and 2014, the number of incarcerated women increased by 700%.* For those women who lived and died resisting the dehumanization of confinement--physical, social, intellectual--the threat of being bound was real, constant, and lethal. In A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, Hill presents bitter, unflinching history that artfully captures the personas of these captivating, bound yet unbridled African-American women. Hill's passionate odes to Zora Neale Hurston, Lucille Clifton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Grace Jones, Eartha Kitt, and others also celebrate the modern-day inheritors of their load and light, binding history, author, and reader in an essential legacy of struggle. *The Sentencing Project

Neglected American Women Writers of the Long Nineteenth Century

Neglected American Women Writers of the Long Nineteenth Century
Author: Verena Laschinger
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2019-04-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0429513933

Neglected American Women Writers of the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Verena Laschinger and Sirpa Salenius, is a collection of essays that offer a fresh perspective and original analyses of texts by American women writers of the long nineteenth century. The essays, which are written both by European and American scholars, discuss fiction by marginalized authors including Yolanda DuBois (African American fairy tales), Laura E. Richards (children’s literature), Metta Fuller Victor (dime novels/ detective fiction), and other pioneering writers of science fiction, gothic tales, and life narratives. The works covered by this collection represent the rough and ragged realities that women and girls in the nineteenth century experienced; the writings focus on their education, family life, on girls as victims of class prejudice as well as sexual and racial violence, but they also portray girls and women as empowering agents, survivors, and leaders. They do so with a high-voltage creative charge. As progressive pioneers, who forayed into unknown literary terrain and experimented with a variety of genres, the neglected American women writers introduced in this collection themselves emerge as role models whose innovative contribution to nineteenth-century literature the essays celebrate.

An OutKast Reader

An OutKast Reader
Author: Regina N. Bradley
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2021-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820368857